The government says that it is funding training to help GPs’ receptionists to be more sensitive to patients’ needs. Receptionists must decide which patients are a priority, as pressure on them increases by the day, and their allegedly brusque demands for symptom details are hurtful.
Perhaps these receptionists will be sent to a special school where they will study old videos of Les Dawson doing his strange drag act as the woman who can’t quite bring herself to say indelicate things. Her voice dies out to silence halfway through the sentence, while the rubbery lips continue to mouth the words. So the Les Dawson-trained receptionist will say: “So sir, you’ve got a problem [inaudible whisper, lips moving emphatically] downstairs in the front-bottom waterworks department?”
Of course, this is no good if you’re talking to the patient on the phone. The person who actually needs this sensitivity training is my wife, who, when I plaintively inform her I have flu-like symptoms, gasps something like: “Influenza? Like the Spanish flu of 1918 that killed 50 million people? Oh, my God, we have to inform the council and the army and seal off the house.”
Uneasy elevations
Lady Chakrabarti is coming in for criticism on the subject of schools. But that isn’t exactly why her recent elevation makes me uneasy. I wonder if Jeremy Corbyn ever says that his other shadow cabinet ministers bring him problems, but Shami Chakrabarti brings him solutions? That is how Margaret Thatcher used to describe David Young, the dynamic chairman of the Manpower Services Commission. In 1984 she made him a life peer, and as Lord Young of Graffham he was elevated into cabinet, first as minister without portfolio, then secretary of state for employment and then for trade and industry. He had a very substantial government career, without ever having to suffer the indignity of pinning on a rosette or ringing on doorbells, or kissing babies – the ordeal, in short, of having to persuade the tiresome public to vote for him. He was a loyal Thatcherite partisan who made cabinet colleagues restless, particularly Norman Tebbit, because he never earned his spurs at the ballot box. Now, like others who have followed his trajectory, Chakrabarti has the chance to wield power, swathed in ermine. Mightn’t it be better for her to renounce her title, like Tony Benn, and fight an election?
Bush whacking
One the creepiest aspects of Donald Trump’s “locker room” tape was the 15 microseconds of fame it conferred on Billy Bush, cousin of George W Bush Jr, the talkshow host who was heard submissively and supportively giggling along to Donald’s sexual assault brags. Poor, pathetic Billy Bush, who loses his job, gets the odium, but doesn’t get to participate in Donald’s satanic celebrity status. One of the great undiscussed things about this kind of pathology is how the bully always needs a beta male, a lower-ranking wingman and yes man to validate the groping and the harassment.
Billy Bush and Donald Trump, the world’s least charming double act, were predicted in Neil LaBute’s icily prescient1997 movie, In the Company of Men. Howard, played by Matt Malloy, is a nerdy office worker who has no success with women. He falls under the spell of macho alpha dog Chad, played by Aaron Eckhart, who is similarly unable to get dates. Chad gigglingly persuades Howard to join him in a misogynist revenge plan to break the heart of a hearing-impaired woman who works in their office. It starts as a nasty joke and becomes a nasty reality. Watch the movie, and you can imagine the relationship of Billy and Donald.
If GPs’ receptionists need retraining, would Les Dawson videos help? | Peter Bradshaw
